Hope
by Grayson's Redoubt
Summary: A rainshower prompts the Sole Survivor to look on everything she's built (and to reflect on what she's lost). The wasteland isn't what she had wanted, but she has made it home anyway.


How long has it been since she had a decent shower?

The rain comes down in torrents, carrying as much grime as it would wash off.

Aaliyah shook her head, water droplets rolling off her dark hair to splash on the saturated ground. She finds herself grateful for her grandparents' farm-that place, so many summers, so long ago.

Because it means she can help these people get back on their feet. It means she can build a safe haven as she searches for her son.

But she swears to herself, as she sloshes through the mud and the dying grass, through puddles and God knows what else… one of these days, when she isn't-no, best not to think of Shaun (Father, the synths call him)-then she'll make a home of this place. Of the wasteland left in the stead of her home.

And one day, she'll have a proper shower.

Castle retaken, the Minutemen on their feet and able to help people again. Supply lines and armed settlers; they have nothing to fear from raiders anymore.

Sometime as she gets entangled with the Railroad, Aaliyah finally comes to terms with the fact that she'll never get to live as she grew up.

She finally relents, knife slicing through thick dark hair one day, saturating it in river water to make it easier to grasp. It's a ragged cut, messy, short, but she gives it a week and her hair falls into a slightly messy mop that stays out of her face, stays underneath her hat.

She misses the hair that used to fall around her shoulders (misses Nate's fond smiles and idle hands running through her hair).

She watches as clumps of jet black hair fall, strands scattering to the wind as the majority lands in the water. It was the last piece of her past (no, Shaun, still) that she had held to. No more.

No more.

The scar across her eye, running in a vertical line across her right brow, on top and below her right eye, itches sometimes, a reminder of her shattered expectations. She had-had stumbled out of the vault, armed with a 10 millimeter weapon, sobs threatening to wrack her body because her husband, her Nate, was dead and she'd seen him shot before her it hadn't been that long ago but his body was freezing, preserved perfectly and she had to find her son.

It was the first raiders she encountered that taught her the ferocity of a mother's need to find their lost child. Aaliyah had raised that weapon, had pulled the trigger, had watched as another human being fell to the earth, bleeding and crying in agony.

She had expected to walk out of the vault and… find something else. Not this.

Weathered features can't help but to smile as she sees the children, the families, flocking to the settlements she helped build, help prepare. People would come in, drawn by the beacon, even as she's in the wreckage of the prewar house, laying new floor, building up and above, supported by the foundations and framework of the original building.

Aaliyah was no electrician, no plumber, no carpenter. She was a farmer's granddaughter, a military lawyer. Her home was in books, rules and regulations, or on her knees in the dirt, coaxing life out of what had previously appeared lifeless.

She didn't expect the life she left the vault to find, but she's found she-she has _hope_ for it. Hope enough that has her working with as many people as she can, manipulating, masterminding. The only loyalty she holds are to those families. To the gleams of hope she can see in the eyes of the children, in the eyes of the outcasts as they find their new homes.

The Institute created lives of their own, and insists on holding them captive, holding them as slaves, as labor. She's seen these synths do horrible things, but these synths were meant to emulate humans. Humans do horrible things to one another all the time.

The Brotherhood, oh, where to start. Aaliyah had been a strong proponent of technology, of letting it grow and expand, to find new places in the world where it can be used. The Brotherhood only wants to take it away, to hold it to themselves (and become a police state of sorts, being the law and the law being the only ones allowed to know technology, to possess it).

And while the Railroad's goals were admirable, where Aaliyah had no qualms in what they were doing, saving synths and giving them new homes, new identities…

Her loyalty ultimately lay with hope. With families starting anew, families struggling to survive.

She fears she'll lose Shaun. And… she can't even bring herself to mourn him. Some part of her seems to have done that when he was taken away from her, sixty years before.

If only Nate could see her. Sun-weathered skin, leather armor and metal plating, knife and sheath in the back of her belt and pistol holstered at her side. A sniper rifle cradles in her arms as she walks and Aaliyah knows experience has tempered her nerves, given her a steady hand and a steady breath. A tricorner hat sits on short hair, slightly lopsided to shade her eyes from the blazing sunlight.

She will forge a new life from this wasteland.


End file.
